SzSA YearBook 2016/17

SZENT-GYÖRGYI MENTORS
BALÁZS PAPP
Synthetic and Systems Biology Unit,
Institute of Biochemistry,
Biological Research Center of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Address: Temesvari krt. 62., H-6726 Szeged, Hungary
E: pappb@brc.hu
T: +36 62/599-661
RESEARCH AREA
Thanks to recent advances in molecular biology techniques,
a vast amount of data has been accumulated on the genetic
material of organisms and ‘molecular circuits’ (i.e. molecular
constituents and their interactions) of their cells. Our rapidly
increasing knowledge on the molecular details allows
us to address some of the most fundamental questions
of biology. What are the general principles governing the
structure and function of molecular circuits? Is it possible to
predict the cell’s behavior, such as the nutrient utilization of
bacteria, based on knowledge of the wiring diagram of its
molecular circuits? How do mutations and environmental
changes (such as the administration of drug compounds)
influence the operation of molecular circuits? Can we predict
whether a mutation is harmful for the organism? How
did molecular circuits arise during evolution and why do we
observe the naturally occurring circuits instead of chemically
possible alternative ones? Employing computational
biology techniques and large-scale molecular datasets, our
lab investigates these questions in the best characterized
unicellular organisms, Escherichia coli and baker’s yeast.
Among others, our work offers insights into the rewiring of
molecular circuits in bacteria during the evolution of antibiotic
resistance.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Notebaart, R.A., Szappanos, B., Kintses, B., Pál, F., Györkei, A.,
Bogos, B., Lázár, V., Spohn, R., Csörgő, B., Wagner, A., Ruppin,
E., Pál, C., Papp, B. (2014) Network-level architecture and
the evolutionary potential of underground metabolism.
Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 111: 11762-11767.
Szappanos, B., Kovács, K., Szamecz, B., Honti, F., Costanzo,
F., Baryshnikova, A., Gelius-Dietrich, G., Lercher, M.J., Jelasity,
M., Myers, C.L., Andrews, B.J., Boone, C., Oliver, S.G., Pál, C.,
Papp, B. (2011) An integrated approach to characterize
genetic interaction networks in yeast metabolism. Nature
Genet 43: 656-62.
Pál, C., Papp, B., Lercher, M.J., Csermely, P., Oliver, S.G., Hurst,
L.D. (2006) Chance and necessity in the evolution of minimal
metabolic networks. Nature 440: 667-70.
Papp, B., Pál, C., Hurst, L.D. (2004) Metabolic network analysis
of the causes and evolution of enzyme dispensa bility in
yeast. Nature 429: 661-4.
Papp, B., Pál, C., Hurst, L.D. (2003) Dosage sensitivity and the
evolution of gene families in yeast. Nature 424: 194-7.
TECHNIQUES AVAILABLE IN THE LAB
Basic bioinformatics and chemoinformatics methods, comparative
genomics methods, modeling metabolic networks,
metabolomics, integrating functional genomics datasets, R
statistical programming language, Matlab programming
language, Perl programming language, statistical methods,
image analysis, machine learning.
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